Saturday, September 29, 2012

A few years ago, I surveyed storefronts across the downtown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, interpreting their various placard signs as a proxy
for the evolution of a city whose demographics and character have changed
significantly over the years.As Cambridge has morphing from a
tired, intermittently gritty bohemian college town into an upscale tourist
destination, the few local establishments that have clung to their now primo
locations stand out like “a Chevy Malibu parked among all the Volvos and Audis”,
to use my apt analogy from a few years ago.Many of Cambridge’s retail newcomers have been national
upscale chains like Talbot’s or Crate and Barrel.As a contrast, the remaining local stores have ardently
retained their aging faded signs as an icons of distinction, no doubt hoping to
inspire a particular reaction among visitors to Cambridge: “That place must me a local institution; look how
old the sign is!”

I would never claim to say that Cambridge’s transformation
is complete or fully-realized.Cities
are perpetually volatile, and its next phase may invoke something that no one
can anticipate, reflecting the tastes of a consumer contingent that does not
yet exist.Whatever the future of
Cambridge, its gentrification is unambiguously more pronounced than East
Passyunk, the South Philadelphia neighborhood featured in this blog post.

Long a stronghold of the region’s Italian-American
community, South Philly has evolved considerably over the last three or four
decades—from an overwhelmingly working and lower-middle class stronghold of the
region’s Italian-American community to a patchwork of varied demographics:
impoverished African American and southeast Asian neighborhoods, Mexican
vendors in the formerly exclusively Italian market, a small (and shrinking)
Irish enclave clinging valiantly to survival along the Delaware River, a
tsunami of young professionals surging from the north, and, yes, quite a few squares
in the quilt that remain resolutely blue-collar Italian.When I lived in Philadelphia in 2004,
the East Passyunk corridor was one of them.Just a few blocks away from the economically disadvantaged
Point Breeze neighborhood on the other side of Broad Street, East Passyunk no
doubt looked very much the same as it did in the 1950s.The storefronts featured family-run dry
cleaners, hardware, bakeries, tailoring, convenience stores, and so forth.

Not anymore.In
the ensuing eight years, the infantry of yuppies that had aready stormed the
affluent Bella Vista neighborhood decided to push their front line further
south.They probably found East
Passyunk more affordable, more relaxed, maybe a tiny bit easier to park the
cars.Home values have tripled in
the last decade, and quite a few of those mom-and-pop establishments I
recognized have morphed into fair trade coffee shops, pilates studios, sushi
bars—you know the drill.

Interestingly, several of the standby Italian eateries
remain in the neighborhood but have themselves gentrified, offering a few more
gourmet menu options as a response to the more moneyed demographic (or, more likely,
the same beloved specialties as before but at a higher price).Take this one, for example, which I
don’t believe is anything fancy, but apparently it recently spruced itself up
considerably:

Some of these old standbys now offer valet parking, which
would have seemed ridiculous along East Passyunk twenty years ago, but again
demonstrates both a response to a clientele that is not only more likely to own
cars, but they would also have no qualms shelling out an extra Andrew Jackson
to shift the burden of parking that vehicle onto someone else.

Many of the long established Italian-American families
remain, and not all of the traditional retail has fled or capitulated to yuppie
encroachment.A quick scan across
the commercial corridor at any point reveals the bifurcated income levels, and
all it takes is a look at those signs.Take, for instance, this very typical view along the sidewalk at a more
southerly portion of East Passyunk Road:

And the storefront on the opposite side of the street:

In contrast with downtown Cambridge, I cannot detect very
much conscious interplay between the old and new signage here.The old signs in East Passyunk offer
less untapped semantic content than the vintage marquees of Harvard Square; the
elder businesses here in South Philadelphia don’t need to distinguish
themselves from upmarket national chains, because, at this point, virtually
nothing in the neighborhood is a chain.So in East Passyunk, the age of signs connotes one obvious distinction:
income.Old signs equate to old
businesses, which are the domain of the working class families who have lived
here for generations.Only very
recently have these households sat cheek-by-jowl in rowhomes filled with
affluent professionals.

The income/education disparity manifested by these signs
does not at this point seem like a heated kettle ready to boil over.They seem to co-exist peacefully in
general.But one sign in
particular demonstrates the chasm in consumption patterns between neighbors
better than any of the others.

It’s hard to find an online reference to King of Jeans that
doesn’t feature such adjectives as “iconic”, “landmark”—even “spectacular”. The
size of the sign doesn’t hurt.As
the woman in pink at the lower-right of the photo indicates, it’s huge—it
spreads across three full stories and a cladding that conceals four buildings
cobbled together.But the content
of the sign is what makes it truly irresistible for some.Part roller disco, a little
greaser-rebel, a soupcon of S&M, and a healthy dose of now broadly-known
Guido culture, the sign’s ability both to bewilder and offend has elevated it
to the level of a South Philly meme.If King of Jeans intends to evoke something, the owner sure ain’t
telling, but that’s part of its mystique.In fact, the owner might not be doing much besides fighting his or her
way through court: evidently King of Jeans is seriously tax delinquent,
which may explain why the conspicuously old-time vendor (confirmed by the
signage) is closing the store after so many years.Is the inevitable demise of King of Jeans a further symptom
of considerable gentrification?Perhaps the combination of low sales (shrinking old-school South
Philadelphian clientele) and high costs (more taxes due to escalating property
values) stymied the long-profitable business.

The real indicator of things to come: a local developer hasbought the property and has proposed to transform it into apartments, offices,
and retail.Now the East Passyunk fan base has
begun rallying behind that sign.While everyone seems to concede that it can’t remain at its current
location—a building whose upper-level fenestration got sheathed decades ago
(just as it did across American commercial districts in the 1950s, and I
blogged about it recently http://dirtamericana.blogspot.com/2012/08/nostalgic-for-future.html)
--most agree that it should never leave Philadelphia.The developer has agreed to salvage it, and ideally it will
remain in South Philly.But all this
buzz merely demonstrates the polyphony of taste cultures who ostensibly feel a
certain degree of stewardship over neighborhood relics such as King of
Jeans.Nobody who patronizes the
street’s new sushi bars and acupuncture studios genuinely believe the sign is
awesome or spectacular.Rather, the
yuppie/hipster denizens (whose consumer tastes merge more often than either constituent
is willing to admit) share a fondness for irony, which does not preclude them
from mocking the potentially more lowbrow tastes of the working-class families
who’ve lived in the neighborhood for decades.Yet the swirl of opinions and emotions surrounding this
simultaneously sleazy/kitschy sign is more complicated than this, because no
evidence exists that the long-established Italian American families cherish the
sign or the establishment any more than the yuppies do.Sure, the two stakeholders here might
find common ground at a quality, long-familiar restaurant or bakery, but tastes
in apparel are simply too ephemeral and too demographically precise for a store
such as this to adapt very easily.Restaurants often suffer if they deviated from long-proven model;
clothing stores will die if they fail to change.It’s likely that the King of Jeans was ready to descend from
his throne, regardless of tax delinquent status.

One final rumor further beclouds any further analysis of
the-sign-that-nobody-loved-until-now: several native Philadelphians can attest
that it isn’t even that old.Thirty years tops, but possibly only twenty.Nowhere near as old as some of the legitimate institutions
that have survived the encroachment of the creative class on East Passyunk.If the rumors are true, the sign for
the King of Jeans warrants an entirely new aesthetic reconciliation.Did the proprietor deliberately design
it to look old and faded, so it would appear as old as some of the mom-and-pops
nearby?Were the owner’s promotional
sensibilities so tongue-and-cheek that he could anticipate a market hungry for
ironic cultural references, for cheesy vintage signs?Was the owner trying to stimulate nostalgia among the
working class Italian American demographic that exclusively lived there at the
time, or is the sign merely trying to provoke them?

More likely than not, I’m imposing a level of consciousness
into this collision of cultures by interpolating a conflict that doesn’t
actually exist.In a matter of
weeks, King of Jeans will be gone, and the building that houses it will undergo
a complete facelift.No doubt the first
floor will eventually house a slow food kitchen, a Cambodian gastropub,
designer apparel for dogs, vegan cheesesteaks, or similarly themed retail
catering to the neighborhood’s cadre of bourgeois bohemians.All with brand-new signage further
shifting the old-to-new balance in favor of the latter.Unless these stores’ proprietors choose
a deliberately old-fashioned, outdated, or unfashionable type of signage (I’m
thinking tungsten filament lightbulbs—not green but still worth as a retro hat-tip)
to meet the newcomers’ insatiable appetite for cheeky irony.And the appreciation and
commodification of irony—more than educational attainment, income levels, or
number of children—may ultimately prove the wedge that divides the two camps
here in Philadelphia’s least heated class war.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

My latest post went up last night on UrbanIndy.com. The issue it features is fairly parochial: a minor collector street on the east side of Indianapolis is far wider than it needs to be. Ritter Avenue, barely four miles long in its entirety, offers a reasonable accommodation for a segment south of East 10th Street, looking more or less like this:

It's not perfect--no sidewalk for much of the west side of the road, few crosswalks, the southern portion has utilities poles blocking much of the existing paved space for the sidewalk--but the bike lanes are clearly striped with good signage, and the remaining sidewalk has a good setback from the street. The neighborhood around it (mostly Irvington) is also fairly walkable.Ritter Avenue north of 10th Street is a different story:The street received a serious widening and exists solely to serve cars. Speed limits have increased. The hard curbs eliminate a safe shoulder for cyclists to ride on. Why did the City do this? Most likely it was to accommodate Community Hospital East, a major hub that sits at East 16th Street and Ritter. (North of East 16th, Ritter reverts to essentially a country road). Maybe Community Hospital needs somewhat wide streets to cater to emergency vehicles traveling at high speeds. But East 16th, the other street that the hospital fronts, is not as wide as Ritter, despite being longer, more prominent, and having an overall higher average daily traffic volume. (Ritter isn't even a prominent enough street to justify a traffic count.)If anything, this segment of Ritter Avenue would be a prime candidate for a road diet: reducing it from four lanes to two, or even reducing it to three lanes with a shared central turn lane (the same level of services that East 16th Street offers). Both options would allow for larger shoulders that could accommodate both bike lanes and sidewalks. Narrowing the width of the lanes might even allow for on street parking on one side of the street, further calming traffic and promoting a safer environment for a variety of users.I explore this situation in much greater detail and with more photos on UrbanIndy.com. Comments as always are welcome.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Inevitably, communities evolve to reflect the personalities
of their inhabitants.Such an
assertion may come across as glib, and it probably is, but it’s far better than
the opposite—when a character of its community seems at odds with its constituents’
goals.A fundamental goal of an
effective representative democracy is that local governments allow people to
articulate what they want out of their communities.Obviously the ethics behind this practice can come into
question, such as when a town like Mt. Laurel, NJ
essentially restricted the construction of housing that would accommodate
families below a certain desirable income level, or when several entire states
levied poll taxes with the de facto
goal of disenfranchising an entire subset of the population which generally
lacked financial wherewithal and was overwhelmingly African American heritage.But these dramatic negative examples
are the exception to that lazily flowing stream of the provision of local
government services.Most of a
town’s personality manifests itself in the most mundane of ways.

Nonetheless, two municipalities will usually reveal a few distinctions
in how they choose to fund infrastructure, even if it comes down to inconsequential
differences in design.The obvious
best way to witness these differences is to stand along a border such as this
one in the suburbs of Cleveland:

For about six blocks, South Taylor Road forms the boundary
between Cleveland Heights and University Heights, two older, racially
integrated, mostly affluent inner-ring suburbs on the eastern side of Ohio’s
largest metropolis.As is often
the case, the municipal boundary rests on the crown of the road, so that, from
this angle looking northward, the left-hand side is Cleveland Heights and the
right-hand side is University Heights.

The differences are often subtle—nothing here as obvious as
contrasting paving surfaces for the two sides of the road.But the cities’ public works
departments clearly pull from different catalogs when purchasing some of their
basic streetscape elements.Notice
the road sign on the right-hand side of the street:

And then across the street, on the Cleveland Heights side of
South Taylor Road:

The “Cedarbrook” is no longer in all caps and it is missing
the “Road” suffix.Another visible
contrast is in the style of the streetlights.On the University Heights side of the street, the mast that
projects the light further into the street is thicker and looks to be of a
similar metal as the sheath that encloses the bulb:

By contrast, on the Cleveland Heights side of the road, the
mast is of an apparently different material that is thinner and with a narrower
diameter, and it appears to be fairly rusted:

Obviously these distinctions demand a keen eye, and by most
considerations they hardly matter. But review that first photo of both sides of
the street yet again, and now the differences between the streetlights should pop out.

Municipalities enjoy a wide berth in the array of designs
they are able to employ for a number of roadside features, particularly those
for which a motorist’s ability to see is important but not essential.Streetlights can obviously assume a
variety of configurations, and signs indicating the name of local roads are a
common method of municipal branding—most communities consciously seek out
different road name signs to distinguish themselves from their neighbors.Given the options available, the
differences between Cleveland Heights and University Heights are relatively
modest.I’m surprised they don’t
even use different colors.

The same flexibility can’t be said for signs regulating
speed limits.

The safety of roadways depends on a clearly recognizable
indicator of the maximum (and sometimes minimum) allowable speeds.During the first half of the 20th
century, speed limit signs assumed a variety of guises (some of them
particularly wordy) to the point many drivers ignored them.The release of the Manual on Uniform
Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) in 1948 by the Federal Highway Administration
(FHWA) set a standard of black lettering on a white shield, looking like the one on the University Heights side of South Taylor Road,
seen in the above photo.This
design has remained more or less unchanged ever since, despite many new
editions and updates to the MUTCD.We’ve all seen exceptions, most likely in the grassy median of a
subdivision or the entrance into an affluent community.But these customized speed limit signs
nearly always apply on local roads—not important collector streets like South
Taylor.

Despite a federal mandate for uniformity in the appearance
of speed limit signs, municipalities are generally left to their own devices
when it comes to traffic control.In
the case of these two Cleveland suburbs, one of the key regulations seems to
place them at odds with on another.The photo above, with the speed limit of 25, looks northward on South
Taylor Road, viewing the regulation from the University Heights side.When I pivoted 180 degrees, looking
southward, this is what I see at the exact same location on the Cleveland
Heights side of the road:

Depending on the side of the street one is traveling, the
speed limit is different.Northbound traffic in University Heights must travel 10 mph slower than
southbound traffic in Cleveland Heights.Whether intentional or not, such a regulation could easily serve as an
embedded speed trap, much to the frustration of passers-by who, not knowing the
idiosyncrasies of individual suburbs, would probably never expect such a
thing.Obviously all it takes is
reading the signs as they pertain to the respective direction of travel, so a
motorist would be hard-pressed to make a convincing claim of entrapment.Perhaps University Heights, with John
Carroll University at its hub, has recognized the need for lower speeds to
protect the safety of a heavy pedestrianized student population.Or maybe the city is deliberately
trying to moderate the notoriously speedy younger drivers.After all, Cleveland Heights is an
equally pedestrian friendly suburb.I’m sure other neighboring communities have attempted similarly
eccentric methods of enhancing the distinctions of the regulatory environment
between them; the results aren’t always as innocuous as a specialty vintage
road sign.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Just last night my latest article posted on Urban Indy,
and apparently it also earned a mention on Streetsblog. I’m not going to double-post, so allow
me to paraphrase here.

An often-overlooked opportunity for infill development is a
ubiquitous land use across disinvested inner cities: the mom-and-pop,
unlicensed used car dealership.
We’ve all seen them before: names like “R&W Auto Sales” (pick your
favorite two letters and separate with an ampersand), prices never into the five digits (and sometimes not
even four), no website, and signage along the lines of “buy now and take home”. It isn’t a particularly bold statement
to suggest that small used dealerships flourish in low-income
neighborhoods. They are a cue that
land values in the area are low: aside from the fact that they are more likely
to locate close to their demographic base, these dealerships need cheap land to operate. Obviously
they require more space than a convenience store or a tax filing service in
order to run the business; their inventory occupies a parking lot. And since the inventory is already
significantly devalued, the best way to guarantee a secure profit margin is to
operate on land where the per square foot costs are rock bottom.

The montage of photos below shows the propensity of used car
dealerships in some near southeast neighborhoods in Indianapolis. The Virginia Avenue corridor runs
through three neighborhoods: Fletcher Place, Holy Rosary, and Fountain Square,
all of which have begun gentrifying quite a bit in the last decade. The used car lots prevail, but it’s
clear that some of the owners are sitting on a potential development gold mine,
and they know it: many of them are for sale, and it is inevitable that the
others will likely go in the near future.
If anything, land values have increased enough that it’s hard to operate
such a low-end business, so if R&W or any other owner chooses to cash out,
they very well could relocate to another part of town where cheap, highly
visible land is still abundant.

Below is a photo series of used car lots along Virginia
Avenue, starting from the heart of Fountain Square and working northwesterly
through Fletcher Place toward downtown:

(Note: the last of these pictures is an automobile broker,
which is a different operation altogether, but it no doubt sought cheap land
because, quite simply, cars take up a lot of space.)

The second photo series is in the Bates-Hendricks
neighborhood, which is experiencing gentrification at a much slower pace, but
it still has its share of properties that could attract infill development in
the next decade. These photos are
particularly interesting because they all sit within a block from one another,
at the intersections of East Street and Morris Street or East Street and
Prospect Avenue, so it’s quite a cluster.

It may be hard to tell from this angle, but four used car
lots are visible within the frame of this photo below:

I’m not going to go into any detail further here (I already
did that at Urban Indy)
but feel free to review that post, which explores the economics behind this
land use in greater detail and provides quite a few more photos. As always, comments are welcome.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

I hate to write on the same topic for two consecutive blog
posts, and I have covered plenty of ground with retail in the past, including
the often-maligned strip mall.But
this photo opportunity was too good to pass up, and it the construction in
progress probably won’t look like this for much longer.From time to time, I get to see how the
landscape has changed when I return to the south side of Indianapolis where I grew
up.And I’ve featured material on
the environment around the prosperous Greenwood Park Mall
back when this blog was but an infant (or a toddler, at least).

The Greenwood Shoppes strip mall in the photo below sits
directly to the west of the Greenwood Park Mall, just across busy U.S. 31.My apologies for the duskiness of the
photos, but it should still be obvious that it is undergoing a sort of
renovation.

Any strip mall that receives an extensive facelift such as
this has clearly struck a grand slam, as suburban retail goes.A huge number of strip malls—I suspect
more than half—never benefit from any cosmetic changes: their tenants downgrade
as they age, until they can’t lease their space at all, and then they retreat
further, from neglect to complete abandonment.They become so obsolete that an investor won’t touch them,
possibly because the surrounding neighborhood has declined economically, but
more likely simply because there are just so many fresher, newer strip malls
that have risen out of pasture land in the ensuing years; the one that is
already a generation old no longer offers just the right location, the right
traffic patterns, or the perfect building design.We’ve all seen them before.A strip that remains successful for 20 years is an
anomaly.Many don’t survive even
that long, as proven by a completely vacant one in the otherwise healthy suburb
of Plainfield that I wrote about a few years ago.The array of dying strip malls that dot
the landscape of Houma (also hardly a struggling city), featured last week, are
not likely to be much older.
An anucleate metropolitan settlement pattern exacerbates the short life cycles
of strip malls, but here in Greenwood Shoppes we have an unusual exception.

It’s not particularly remarkable in any other way: the
tenants are hardly high-end.But
they range from national chains like Half Price Books and Men’s Wearhouse,
which have been at the location at least a decade (possibly two), to local
institutions like McGee Jewelers.During my periodic visits to Greenwood over a handful of years, this
strip mall has never been less than 90% occupied.Thus, the property owner is confident in the shopping
center’s continued viability to invest some money for a facelift.One section of the strip mall is farther along in the process.

It doesn’t look like the changes are going to be that
dramatic.No improvements to
landscaping in the parking lot that I can tell, and clearly no fundamental
changes in the massing or floorplate.The businesses can continue operating—nothing more than a skimming.But stripping away the shell used to
mount the illuminated signs revealed a surprisingly rich history to this strip
mall.

The current tenant is Half Priced Books, but a sign painted
on the brick says “Bedding Liquidators”.The bedding tenant obviously predates the used bookstore, but how old is
it?I have no memory of this
location hosting anything but a Half Priced Books, but that doesn’t mean much. More telling is the fact that the store
used a painted sign to identify itself.Virtually no strip malls use this technique anymore.If we witness illuminated signs these
days, they usually involve floodlights mounted below, shining directly onto a
wooden sign—not one painted directly on the side of the brick.This old sign cannot help but evoke the
faded old five-and-dime advertisements painted on the side of commercial
buildings in a more urban area—only this one, after being concealed for two or
possibly three full decades, is in superior shape.

In a matter of days, the construction team will probably
slap up a new wall to hide this old painted sign, and in a few weeks the
renovations will be complete.The
tenants will remain, confident that they claim one of the best locations within
this large regional shopping hub, and they’re probably right: visitors can look
out at the Greenwood Park Mall from inside just about any storefront.

The plastic surgery performed on Greenwood Shoppes only
seems to emphasize how much this particular strip mall defies the
standards—even within the Greenwood Park Mall area.While the mall itself is healthy, the strip malls
surrounding it in all directions are a very mixed bag.Just to the north, on the other side of
County Line Road (and therefore in the Indianapolis City Limits), sits the much
larger County Line Mall that hosted a Target in decades prior.Since the Target sought a new location
about ten years ago, the County Line Mall has struggled with an occupancy rate
from around 50 to 70%, even after it received a major facelift of its own.Meanwhile, directly to the east of the
mall, across from it on Madison Avenue, sits a strip mall similar in scale to
the Greenwood Shoppes, but its fortunes have taken a different turn:

Though Greenwood Crossing isn’t completely vacant, the
pockmarked parking lot and faded signs demonstrate that it isn’t a top
draw.It even hosts a church,
which is usually a sign of a strip mall that is desperate to recruit tenants.But it is the exact same distance
from the Mall as the Greenwood Shoppes, as evidenced from the final of these
photos, in which the water tower and Dick’s Sporting Goods are visible at the
horizon to the right.Although a
major arterial, Madison Avenue just doesn’t quite command the traffic volume
that U.S. 31 does.

Greenwood Park Mall and the adjacent Greenwood Shoppes
demonstrate little more than the oft-proven notion that retail developers are
at the mercy of their tenants.Suburban
retail, generally lacking a great deal of design innovation, rarely gives its
developers more than it can expect: a conservative, adequate ROI over a
pathetically short life cycle.Then it rots, leaving its residential neighbors to complain to the City
to intervene on the blighted appearance.Every developer thus weighs the odds that its own product will be an
exception to this rule, generating revenue for multiple generations.But the odds are slim enough that the
process of converting greenfields to strip malls has become a race to the
economic bottom: low returns incentivize builders to skimp on hard costs in
order to maximize revenue across a forecasted slim profit margin, while the
persistently low budgets for these shopping centers almost insures that they
will look deteriorated and old-fashioned once enough cheap new developments two
miles have away have displaced it from its hierarchy.

The same could happen here, and Greenwood Shoppes could
easily tank—the income levels of the housing directly surrounding it (mostly
aging apartments) are significantly lower than the norm for both Greenwood and
the south side of Indianapolis.It
could also fail to the newer, much ritzier shopping plaza/strip mall directly
to the southeast, on the opposite side of Fry Road.But both retail typologies (the enclosed mall and the strip
center) have endured through a first and now a second renovation, and, baring a
major change in the economic base of this part of town, they are likely to
remain in this condition for years to come…at least until the next facelift
buries another generation of outmoded signage or architectural details.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

I have chronicled the tireless migration of retail across
metropolitan landscapes several times in the past; it formed the central topic
of one of my earliest blog posts. Unfortunately, most of my posts have
focused on the blight left by outdated retail typologies: the dead malls,
pockmarked parking lots, blighted strip malls, or (at the very best) the once widely
coveted destinations that are now dominated by check cashing centers and pawn
shops. I’m not trying to dwell on
the negative, but the fact remains that focusing on the less prosperous retail
centers helps to substantiate an already manifest assertion: retail in the US
is more or less always soft. The
supply of new retail options always far exceeds the demand; some have even
argued that developers’ ambitions to construct retail has become completely
untethered from consumer demand, to the point that they are no longer related. Retail locates where the investors see
fit, and those investors can range from experienced developers to an elderly
couple hoping to build a strip mall to provide a nest egg for the grandkids.

Thanks to the almost exponential proliferation of shopping
centers over the last half century, the rules for straight-line depreciation of
a retail outlet tend to employ estimations of about 15 years, meaning that the
average commercial plaza will need a thorough renovation in that time frame if
it is to retain a lucrative market.
In fast-growing metropolitan areas, that number could even be
smaller. But suburban growth
patterns, where decentralization is the primary force acting upon new
settlements, are fairly predictable in nature: an auto-oriented shopping plaza
that still lures top-dollar tenants after 40 years is the exception, not the
norm. I have covered the topic of
metropolitan retail periodically over the years, and at the moment I’m not sure
I have anything new to offer.

But smaller communities are another story altogether. Many of them are static in population;
quite a few are shrinking.
Presumably their retail landscapes would echo these patterns by
demonstrating very little change, right?
An evaluation of the small Louisiana city of Houma (50 miles to the
southwest of New Orleans) would suggest that this is not the case. The region itself is not particularly
depressed; consistent growth in the fishing and petrochemical industries kept
the unemployment rate among the nation’s lowest in the spring of 2009, during
the peak of the Great Recession. It’s unemployment has inched up to above 5.0% since then, but it still remains well below both the state and national rate. It’s relatively vigorous economy, however, is exerting only a
modest impact on population change. Houma itself grew 4.1% from between the
2000 and 2010 Census, and the surrounding parish of Terrebonne grew 7.04%—not
bad, considering Houma suffered through four hurricanes in the last decade, and
even better considering Louisiana’s anemic population growth of 1.4% over this
time frame. But these figures
hardly indicate an oil boomtown comparable to the many that have sprouted like
mushrooms in Texas, or the more recent equivalents in Williston, ND and
Gillette, WY.

Despite relatively modest growth, the retail developments
have relentlessly shifted away from Houma’s town center. This pattern isn’t merely referring to
the hegira of downtown businesses to auto-oriented shopping centers—that
obviously happened decades ago.
The latest phase shows a move from those neighborhood strip malls to a
marginally different automobile oriented typology. The side of Houma west of the Intercoastal Waterway that
bisects the city is both higher income and more heavily populated. Nonetheless, most of the shopping
centers that hug the main street look a bit like this:

Granted, this isn’t an altogether fair example, since this
tired old shopping center sits just a half-mile west of downtown Houma, in what
is visibly the lowest income part of town. But a mile further down State Road 24 is wealthier, and the
strip malls still look the same.

The hobbled giant K-Mart has been in decline for decades
now, to the point that surviving branches only occupy that faded strip malls
that Wal-Mart would have jettisoned from its portfolio long ago. (I blogged about this trend in K-Mart a
few years ago.) The only other major retail
neighbor to K-Mart?

A boarded-up dollar store.

Continuing further down State Road 24, the subdivisions are
conspicuously middle class, but tenants suggest low leasing rates in all the
strip malls. The Southland Mall is hanging on and still boasts
some major chains like American Eagle and Bath and Body Works, but it’s not
exactly thriving:

From my observations during an August visit, the mall is
barely 60% occupied, with particularly high vacancy levels in the wing adjacent
to the long-atrophied department store Sears (a frequent occurrence in malls
with Sears that I blogged about earlier). Many of the other
remaining tenants are mom-and-pop stores; nothing wrong with this in theory but
clearly an indicator that the mall isn’t commanding high rents. The outside strip mall across the
street looks better from a superficial visit; at least it’s heavily occupied.

But the tenant mix is hardly lucrative: temp agency, tax
filing, gold/silver exchange, and not one but two Armed Forces Career Centers. (Both are in operation.) I have no objections to any of these tenants, but Michael
Moore observed almost a decade ago the tendency for military recruiters to seek
low-rent retail space. This
relatively large strip mall does not host a single nationally recognized
tenant.

East Houma, with a mostly older housing stock and a smaller,
less affluent population, predictably shows much of the same trend in terms of
its shopping centers:

Most of the centers are either surviving in poor repair,
struggling with high vacancies, or completely abandoned. East Houma residents still have access
to several reasonably large grocery stores, fast food restaurant chains, a
smaller Wal-Mart, and a handful of basic services, but not a single strip mall
would could be considered flourishing.

My favorite example, however, is the old shopping center
just a few blocks from Houma’s partially revitalized Main Street. It’s proximity to city and parish government
offices fostered an idiosyncratic reinvention:

Yes, a former shopping center with one large anchor has
transformed into administrative offices for city government. However, the City of Houma does not
seem to have renewed its latest lease:

This photographic array of shopping centers at various
levels of neglect does not intend to paint a negative portrait of Houma. Frankly, few onlookers have
demonstrated much sentimentality about the decline of automobile-oriented shopping
centers from the 1960s to the 1980s.
But up to this point, nothing I’ve revealed has suggested a small
metropolitan area with unemployment far below the national average. A map of Houma is essential to
distinguish the Houma’s flourishing retail corridor from its various struggling
pockets.

Almost all of the shopping centers photographed up to this
point have rested within the Houma municipal boundaries; if they haven’t, they
at least were close to large residential developments. (The last photo series, showing the
grocery store converted to City Hall, sits almost exactly where the Red “A”
stake rests on the map.) But the
thriving retail corridor does not intersect with any major subdivisions; it is
removed from the grid. It largely
sits on what was probably cheap land outside the city limits, and it
represented by the red ellipse on the left side of the map: State Road 3040,
called either Tunnel Boulevard or Martin Luther King Boulevard, depending on
the location. Along this arterial,
the commercial landscape looks more like this:

It doesn’t win any awards for aesthetics or pedestrian
accommodation, but it is a prosperous retail corridor by almost every
measurement. It carries some of
the most ubiquitous national brands: Books a Million, Target, Applebee’s,
Chili’s, Best Buy, Hobby Lobby, as well as some emerging brands that
fastidiously avoid sub-par locations, such as a Charming Charlie’s. Predictably, the corridor also contains
a Wal-Mart. I counted only one sizable (over 20,000
s.f.) vacant storefront across the entire strip of more than a mile in
length. This stretch of State Road
3040 has become the official commercial/retail hub for the 100,000 residents of
Terrebonne Parish.

What this proves is that a city with the size and relative
prosperity of Houma can sustain a diverse array of retail that befits its
status as a minor metropolitan area.
(It earns this label through shared economic activity with the smaller
city of Thibodaux, in Lafourche Parish 20 miles to the north; the Houma-Bayou
Cane-Thibodaux Metropolitan Statistical Area contains around 200,000 people.) Empirical evidence suggests that the retail
typology has shifted significantly over the years; using definitions provided
by the Urban Land Institute’s Dollars andCents of Shopping Centers, the standard in Houma has evolved from several smaller neighborhood centers
(averaging 60,000 s.f. in Gross Leasable Area) to a more metropolitan
scale. Like beads on a string, a
series of loosely connected community centers (averaging 150,000 s.f.) function
in aggregate as a regional center of well over one million square feet,
allowing all the national names to stand rank-and-file in an easy display as
motorists cruise by in their vehicles.
Meanwhile, any smaller shopping center that doesn’t fall along this
corridor has kissed national names goodbye, with the exception of perennial laggards
like K-Mart.

While I’d hardly assert that a single community like Houma
can operate as a microcosm for similarly sized metros across the county, it is
not entirely difficult to find other examples in otherwise culturally unrelated
municipalities. My home state of
Indiana has two smaller cities, neither of which can boast an economy as strong
or stable as Houma but are more populous (at least for now). Anderson and Muncie have witnessed a
similar migration of all major retail: in Anderson, most all retail hugs a
two-mile stretch along Scatterfield Road, running just to the east of the older
parts of the city. And the smaller
shopping centers not abutting Scatterfield are typically dying or dead. In Muncie, the commercial main street
is McGalliard Road, an arterial north of the old city center.

Houma and Muncie at least share indications of a reawakening
interest toward specialty retail in their historic downtowns; Anderson cannot
claim such a renaissance at this point.
While the trends on display in these smaller cities may not shed much
light on what’s happening in metros over one million inhabitants—metros with an
extensive network of discretely incorporated suburbs—they at least provide some
added texture to our understanding of the omnipresence of decentralization
forces at work. Automobile
dependency is ostensibly so great that neighborhood shopping isn’t necessary;
in a small city, it is just a convenient to line all the retail up in a row on
a busy high way on the more prosperous side of town. One could critique the thriving commercial corridor of Houma
as mindless sprawl for its appearance and utter disregard for transportation
alternatives, not to mention its apparent avoidance of municipal boundaries
that would require it to contribute to the city’s tax base. But retail supply has long pursued the
latest locational trends to save money and capture a broader clientele, while
leaving the blight of obsolete older typologies in its wake. Whether the shift in Houma is sprawl or
part of a broader regionalist way of thinking (opening the visibility of these
storefronts to all of Terrebonne Parish and not just those who live in Houma),
really depends on how planners and economists contextualize their data.

About Me

This blog concerns itself with the foundation of American dirt, regardless of where I claim to “live” at that moment. It is the playing field and landscape upon which all living participants tend to their own aspirations, leaving non-indigenous built forms which my aging digital camera hopes to capture.